All Ray Charles fans will want to check out The Definitive Ray Charles, because it's the first time a compiler has been able to combine the chart-topping hits from his Atlantic and ABC-Paramount years into one package. This means that we get the Genius's hits from 1953's "Mess Around" right through his golden R&B Atlantic era ("I've Got a Woman", "Drown in My Own Tears", "Hallelujah I Love ...
Clapton caught the "unplugged" trend just at the right time, when the public was hungry to hear how well rock stars and their material could hold up when stripped of elaborate production values. Clapton himself seemed baffled by the phenomenon, especially when picking up the armload of Grammys Unplugged earned him, including Record and Song of the Year for "Tears in Heaven", the ...
Predictably, given the drug problems which preceded its release, Clapton's second solo album proper seems to come and go in an opium haze of its own making. Oddly though, it suits him. As the history of rock attests, if you're going to get into one hard drug then you may as well make it heroin. Whereas cocaine feeds the ego and destroys judgement, heroin sublimates it and allows the artist to ...
Guitar-slinging blues mama, erudite songwriter and social activist, Bonnie Raitt has become a veritable institution within American music over her three-decade plus career. This overdue Best of features some of her greatest hits since she signed up with Capitol in 1989. The songs included date back to her seminal and profile-raising (not to mention multi-Grammy winning) album Nick ...
When this collection was first released, back in 1961, it soon became the bible of that decade's folk-blues revival, a set of songs which had scorched deep lines in the blues psyche, subsequently modified, electrified and boogie-fied. This reissue also includes a freshly exhumed alternative take of "Travelling Riverside Blues", as good an excuse as any to upgrade from old vinyl. The original ...
If this is your first exposure to Eric Clapton, a bit of bewilderment would be in order. This is the legendary guitar icon. This is (as his early apostles once proclaimed) God. Ranging from the mid-80s through to the late 90s, The Clapton Chronicles owes less to the groundbreaking blues-rock of Clapton's 60s and 70s classics than to the polished-to-a-glare pop of Phil Collins, who produced ...